Social Media is all consuming on a regular day. But if you are pursuing a career in social media management as a freelance social media manager you will be eating, sleeping and breathing social media.
Now this can be a good thing but there is a time where EVERY social media manager wants to delete everything and run to live in a forest. Now, I don’t want you to quit before you get started but be prepared for how consuming social media is.
Plus, social media can be ruthless when it comes to trolls, doom scrolling, trends coming and going in a blink and the need to impress your clients with results. It can get overwhelming!
This is what you are going to do in order to Avoid Social Media Burnout as a Social Media Manager:
Morning and Night Boundaries:
You have to set boundaries for yourself to not be on your phone for personal or business at certain times throughout your day. Whether that is putting it away at certain time each night OR not looking at your phone until a certain part of your morning.
No Phone Days
At least once a month have a no phone day. This is an entire day where you get to exist outside of the screen. This will provide balance and time to refresh before going back to it.
App Time Limits
You can set app limits for individual apps. This means you can only allow yourself to use TikTok for 3 hours a day and then it will kick you out. Yes, you can over ride it in the moment but it does give you the millisecond of a break to pull you out of a doom scroll
Alarms
While you are on your phone set alarms to go off every 15 minutes or so to help get you out of the scroll. Yes, if you are working you will need to stay on platform. But I don’t know about you, I have gone into Instagram to post for a client and then spent three hours scrolling – oops. Set the alarms to help manage your time.
Business + Personal Hours
Set social media business hours for personal and business use. If you are posting for your clients first thing in the morning, in the afternoon schedule time off of social media. Also, allocate some time for just personal scroll time where you don’t have to analyze content or save reels audios, you get to just enjoy the content.
Remember: These are only a handful of ideas to help you avoid burning out as you get started as a social media manager. Now if you have been a social media manager for a while and you are already into the stages of burnout these are more crucial than ever. If you hate social media and are starting to resent your business, that is a sign of burnout.
Regularly frustrations or annoyances are not burnout. It can start that way but burnout is a true feeling of detaching from the reason you started your business in the first place. It’s a deep exhaustion that you can’t really shake so you keep pushing through by going through the motions.
The only thing that can heal burnout is time, boundaries and a giving your body and brain rest. Rest is a loaded word because some people can not sit still for the life of them. But there are a handful of kinds of rest for your body and for your brain.
Start by setting these boundaries in the beginning of your business journey can help you run your social media manager business long term.